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The
Economy's `Dolt Factor'

Robert Parry
September 9, 2001

George
W. Bush’s public relations strategy in the face of a slumping economy is
to convince the American people that he’s personally “concerned”
about the depressed stock prices and the loss of hundreds of thousands of
jobs.

The word “concerned” has become a staple of
Bush’s remarks, whether at Labor Day rallies or on the White House lawn.

Bush has even declared his strong affection for the
American people. During an appearance in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday with
Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, Bush announced that Fox “loves the
people of Mexico, and I hope by now there’s no question that I love the
people of America as well.”

Bush elaborated on his concern Friday in comments
about the sharp increase in the unemployment rate to 4.9 percent. “Any
American out of work is one too many Americans out of work,” Bush said.

Clearly, the younger Bush doesn’t want to make the
mistake his father made when he seemed to be insensitive to the suffering
of Americans during the last recession in the early 1990s. So Bush’s
speechwriters have inserted frank rhetoric about the existence of an
economic problem – “the slowdown is real,” Bush said Friday –
combined with expressions of sympathy for the average guy – “it’s
affecting too many lives, and we’re concerned about it.”

As for how the White House will address these
deepening economic woes, Bush reaffirmed his commitment to his legislative
agenda: maintain the $1.35 trillion tax cut, open new government lands for
oil and natural gas drilling, and grant the president more power to speed
trade agreements.

But Bush’s words did nothing to boost the spirits
on Wall Street.

Prior to Bush’s talk, the stock market had been
making a modest rally, reversing some of the heavy losses earlier in the
day. As Bush spoke, however, the Dow Industrial index slipped lower again,
eventually dropping about 30 more points before trading ended with the Dow
at 9,605.85, matching lows not seen since March and April. The broader
Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks fell to its lowest point in
three years.

The market’s reaction to Bush’s talk was so
striking that the CNBC anchor asked one of the network’s floor reporters
what traders were saying. The reporter recounted how the traders simply
shrugged their shoulders at Bush’s remarks, with one trader dismissing
Bush’s comments as just “words.”

Hollow Ring

To other Americans, Bush’s protestations of concern
may have the hollow ring of his father’s famous recitation of a talking
point during the 1992 campaign, “Message: I care.” Or the younger
Bush's own garbled expression of sympathy for the average Joe in the 2000
campaign: “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”

The younger Bush might be missing another important
point. During an economic slump, Americans expect more from a president
than sympathy and awareness of the obvious. They want someone who can
rally the nation out of its economic doldrums and instill a confident
can-do spirit.

The historic benchmark is Franklin Roosevelt’s
exhortation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Voters saw some of that uplifting rhetoric in presidents from John Kennedy
to Ronald Reagan. For boundless optimism, few presidents could match Bill
Clinton who convinced many voters that he really did wake up every morning
thinking about what he could do to make their lives better.

Clinton also surrounded himself with shrewd thinkers
– the likes of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers – who understood the
complex three-dimensional nature of modern world economics. One could
disagree with their strategies but few questioned their subtle
appreciation for business intricacies as they navigated economic threats,
from the “Asian flu” financial contagion to credit crises in Mexico,
Russia and Brazil.

By contrast, Bush’s economic team has left even
pro-Republican Wall Street grumbling over a perceived simple-mindedness.
Though Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was well regarded as chairman and
chief executive officer at Alcoa, he has come across as eccentric and out
of touch during his seven-plus months as the Bush administration’s chief
economic spokesman.

Bush Himself

A bigger problem seems to be Bush himself. After
securing the White House, he chose to talk down the economy as a way to
build support for his tax cut. The negative comments rattled an already
shaky stock market.

Then, when Bush tried to sound reassuring, he was
hampered by his inability to speak in anything more than repetitious sound
bites. He is viewed widely – even by his supporters – as lacking
intellectual firepower.

Beyond U.S. borders, he is seen as a dunce who
grabbed power illegitimately through the unprecedented intervention of his
father’s allies on the U.S. Supreme Court – a view shared by many
Americans. With the world facing a “synchronized” slowdown of all the
major economies, international business leaders are unnerved to have
someone regarded as a simpleton at the helm of the largest economic power,
the United States.

Bush has compounded this concern about a U.S. economy
drifting away from the rest of the world through a series of unilateral
foreign-policy decisions. He has repudiated new international agreements,
such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, as well as older ones, such
as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in favor of a single-minded
determination to press ahead with Ronald Reagan’s dream of a missile
shield.

If Gore Had Won

Bush’s anti-government ideology also has prevented
him from formulating a strategy in which Washington takes the lead in
priming the research-and-development pump for some innovative technology
that could become the next New Big Thing for the economy.

Bush and his fellow free-marketers insist that
innovation comes from the private sector, not from the government, and
that the government should just get out of the way. This summer, Bush
personified that attitude when he devoted nearly a month to vacationing on
his ranch in Texas, recharging his batteries.

By contrast, if Al Gore had won the presidency, he
might well have spent the summer rolling up his sleeves and working on
some new technological endeavor. Gore – a prime mover in convincing
Congress to finance the Internet’s infrastructure in the 1980s – had
wanted to invest a chunk of the federal budget surplus in the next
generation of alternative energy sources as well as in vehicles that would
be less harmful to the environment.

One almost could picture Gore out with a road crew
replacing old-fashioned asphalt with solar panels on the nation’s
highways. But Gore didn't get that chance.

After Bush moved into the White House, he bet the
surplus on his tax cut, pulled out of the Kyoto agreement and called for
greater exploitation of fossil fuels.

'Captain Kirk'

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd caught the mood
of Bush’s retrograde era.

“Our missile shield, more science fiction than
science, has become a metaphor for our passive, defensive, retro crouch.
In the name of Captain Kirk, how did this happen? How did we end up
charting a course to timidly go where every man has been before?” [NYT,
Aug. 19, 2001]

While agreeing with her point, some of Dowd’s
readers might have found her professed confusion about how this happened a
touch disingenuous. After all, a key reason the nation is going through
this reverse time warp is that pundits and columnists such as Dowd
obsessed endlessly over Gore’s clunky personality and exaggerated his
supposed exaggerations, while giving Bush and Cheney a relatively free
ride. [See "Protecting Bush &
Cheney," Oct. 16, 2000]

The price for that media imbalance is now being paid.
Because of last fall's events, the United States is led by a man who has
shown very limited ability to grasp the complexities of the economic
challenges ahead. Worse yet, he is a man who inspires little public
confidence and cannot be expected to rally the American people with his
words.

As is typical, the heaviest burden is falling on the
poorer elements of American society, such as the African-American
community and other minority groups whose unemployment rates are
skyrocketing. The pundits will feel the pain mostly in their shrinking
portfolios, as stock prices, too, retreat to levels of yesteryear.

An economy struggling to overcome a devastated
technology sector and a weakening consumer sector also must overcome what
might be called the Dolt Factor, a stomach-turning awareness that the
leader of the most important economy in the world doesn’t have the
skills or wisdom to point a way out.